On June 6th, 1944, 160,000 troops participated in the invasion of Normandy. Today, only a few thousand of those veterans are still alive, with the youngest in their late 90s. As their voices, and those of the million combatants and leaders who swept into motion across Europe 80 years ago, fall silent and pass from living history, Garrett Graff has captured and synthesized them in a new book, When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day.
00:02:01.540So in 2019, I wrote a oral history of 9-11.
00:02:07.260It was called The Only Plane in the Sky.
00:02:09.360And 9-11 is, I think, arguably, or not arguably, the most famous and consequential day of the 21st century.
00:02:19.520And in 2019, it was this very specific moment, which was, it was 18 years after 9-11, and you began to see that day shift from memory into history.
00:02:35.480The first American servicemen and women were coming out of basic training and deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan, who were born after 9-11.
00:02:45.920You know, the first firefighters were coming into FDNY, who were born after 9-11.
00:02:53.940Now, as we approach the 80th anniversary of D-Day, it's sort of the other bookend of that shift, that this was a huge, titanic, monumental day, or arguably the most famous and consequential day of the 20th century.
00:03:12.260There were a million combatants that day in motion across Europe.
00:03:17.640And 80 years on, that number has dwindled to perhaps a few thousand.
00:03:24.960And we are seeing this day shift entirely from memory into history.
00:03:32.020And so, what I wanted to do with this book was to take this moment when we have effectively every first-person story that we will ever have of D-Day, of what that day was like, of what the people who participated in that day experienced and lived,
00:03:51.420and to try to tell really the most comprehensive version of that day that I could in the first person.
00:04:01.320There's a unique power, I think, that comes with oral history where, you know, I think, and I've written plenty of narrative history as well,
00:04:10.980but I think often in narrative history and when you're writing about an event like 9-11 or like D-Day, you write about it historically in a more organized and logical and neater way than anyone that day actually lived or experienced.
00:04:30.140And oral history helps, I think, put you back in that moment knowing only what the participants knew at that time.
00:04:43.020And so, you know, you have these letters and these quotes and these reflections from people aboard the ships crossing the Channel on the night of June 5th.
00:04:52.360They don't know that they're about to have this incredible, heroic, courageous day ahead of them.
00:04:58.280They, in fact, feel quite the opposite, which is they don't feel particularly heroic or courageous about that which they are about to embark upon.
00:05:06.860Because for them, it's unknown and it's terrifying.
00:05:10.980What was the process of putting this book together?
00:05:17.440Well, you provide every now and then some like historical context, give people some understanding what's going on, what they're about to read.
00:05:24.060How did you piece together all this material?
00:05:26.980Like where did you go for the material?
00:05:28.660And then what was the process of creating the story?
00:05:32.480So it's a mix of archival oral histories.
00:05:36.640There are some incredible projects and archives that have pulled together first-person memories and oral histories of veterans at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, at the Imperial War Museum in London.
00:05:52.360The American Veterans Project at the Library of Congress, as well as lots and lots of memoirs and letters from the battlefield, newspaper interviews, magazine pieces, you know, official reports, et cetera, et cetera.
00:06:10.260And I think I ended up amassing about 5,000 oral histories in pulling this together.
00:06:17.320The first draft of this book, believe it or not, was about 1.2 million words.
00:06:26.480And then it was just a lot of whittling and carving and shaping to get it down to the story that's included here, which ultimately features about 700 voices.
00:06:40.940I think the final number is 692 different participants.
00:06:45.380Some names you know, FDR and Churchill and Eisenhower and Bernard Montgomery and a lot of names that you don't.
00:06:54.320You know, American families back home, British civilians, French civilians, allied troops, sailors, soldiers, Marines, Coast Guard, and a lot from a lot of the rest of the countries that were part of that war effort.
00:07:09.460D-Day is as international a day of combat as we have probably ever experienced in history.
00:07:15.900And, you know, it was that naval force off the shores of Normandy had more than a dozen nationalities represented, you know, including more than 600 Dutch sailors.
00:07:33.380What's funny about it is D-Day is just a generic military term for the start of any operation.
00:07:40.680It's a planning term in that when you're doing a large, complex operation, the planning for it starts long before a specific day or month or even location has been chosen.
00:07:56.480And so D-Day is a way to denote the start of an operation and, you know, D-Day plus one is the day after the invasion and D-Day minus one is the day before the invasion, so on and so forth, to give the planners the chance to build these incredibly complex logistical timelines.
00:08:14.700But, you know, at a very technical level, there have been, you know, dozens or scores of D-Days.
00:08:21.540You know, the first one was recorded in World War I.
00:08:24.460There's actually a book that comes out in 1944 called D-Day written by the author John Gunther that's about the invasion of Italy.
00:08:33.880Yet, you know, here we are 80 years later, if you walk up to anyone on the street and say D-Day, there is only one D-Day that we remember in history, and that's June 6th, 1944.
00:08:47.060This is the most epic, most sweeping of all D-Days.
00:08:51.620Not only that, I mean, it's arguably the most sweeping and epic human endeavor that we've ever seen before and might ever see again.
00:09:01.860The scale of that invasion and the planning that went into it is just monumental in the sort of most monumental sense of that word.
00:09:14.800I mean, that was one of the biggest takeaways I got from this book.
00:09:17.840It was a reminder of how big D-Day was.
00:09:22.500When you think about D-Day, oh, you just think about the invasion itself, and you only see maybe the soldiers running up and saving Private Ryan,
00:09:29.940or maybe you see the band of brothers doing their thing, but it was huge.
00:09:35.020Like, give us an idea, like, how many people were involved, how many ships, planes, et cetera?
00:09:40.120It was the largest sea armada ever assembled in human history.
00:09:45.700Depending exactly on how you count it, it was around 5,000 ships involved on D-Day itself.
00:09:52.900You know, more than a million combatants on the move on the Allied side on D-Day, about 160,000 troops in the first invasion wave coming ashore.
00:10:05.44013,000 paratroopers carried aboard more than 2,000 planes.
00:10:10.700And then the scale and scope of everything that was included in that, the jeeps and tanks and gallons of drinking water and numbers of meals ready to eat.
00:10:29.300And, you know, the number of tanks and pints of blood and the whole sweep of that day is really incredible to calculate,
00:10:39.700especially when you think about basically getting every single one of those items to the place that it is supposed to be down to the minute that it is supposed to arrive,
00:10:52.040which was how closely calculated D-Day was, both in terms of loading people aboard ships, but then also the sense of what was arriving at the beach on D-Day itself.
00:11:05.300Were there any quotes that you came across that really stood out to you that captured just how big D-Day was?
00:11:11.060Well, I think one of the things that, and you sort of mentioned this a little bit already,
00:11:16.100that there's really no way to grasp how big D-Day actually was because this personal experience of D-Day was often so small.
00:11:27.500In the foreword to the book, there are sort of two quotes that stand out for me.
00:11:32.040Andy Rooney, who went on, of course, to be the famous CBS News correspondent, he says,
00:11:36.940no one can tell the whole story of D-Day because no one knows it.
00:11:41.040And Ernest Hemingway, who was aboard one of the landing craft that day, although he didn't actually go ashore himself,
00:11:57.760he writes, you could write for a week and not give everyone credit for what that person did on a front of 1,135 yards.
00:12:06.900So I think that the dichotomy of that day is how much of that day was really lived at this incredible individual micro level,
00:12:20.100even as the macro experience of that day was the most monumental in human history.
00:12:27.400Yeah, I've had several World War II historians on the podcast before.
00:12:31.860And I remember, I think I asked this question to Alex Kershaw a while back ago in one interview.
00:12:57.280And, you know, Alex Kershaw, really, you know, one of the things that he helped excavate and tell in a new thread that I follow in this book, too,
00:13:07.360is the incredible story of Company A and Company B of the 116th Infantry Regiment,
00:13:15.760the 29th Division at Omaha Beach, who were the first wave at one end of that beach.
00:13:23.160They were mostly from this single town in Bedford, Virginia.
00:13:28.880And they were devastated and wiped out in the way that has, I think, come to symbolize Omaha Beach and the killing field of Omaha Beach for so many Americans.
00:13:42.160Think about, you know, those first seven minutes of saving Private Ryan.
00:13:45.440And Company A of the 116th storms ashore the first wave at Omaha Beach.
00:13:52.940They leave the ship that morning with 230 members of their company.
00:13:59.460And just 18 will make it to the end of June 6th unscathed.
00:14:06.620And for my purposes, that was actually a very hard portion of the book to tell because there just weren't enough people who survived the first wave ashore at Omaha Beach in order to tell about it later.
00:14:22.060And I struggled to pull together those couple of chapters at the start of the Omaha Beach section.
00:14:27.720But when I talk about doing oral history, my goal in reading and assessing and looking at the first person stories of an event like 9-11 or an event like D-Day is you try to focus on what I call the ordinary and the extraordinary.
00:14:47.500And what I mean by that is you want to sort of figure out what the ordinary experiences are.
00:14:54.580You know, what is sort of the baseline experience that most people have on 9-11 or D-Day so that you can include those and capture what the basic experience of that day was like.
00:15:09.980On 9-11, it's, you know, what's the ordinary experience of someone evacuating down the stairwells of the Twin Towers after the attack?
00:15:18.960What's the ordinary experience of a firefighter responding to 9-11?
00:15:22.940And then you want the extraordinary, you know, you want those incredible outlier stories that push people to the limit of human experience and capability.
00:15:38.840And what just stands out so much about writing about D-Day is how extraordinary the ordinary actually was.
00:15:53.340As you sort of imply in your question, you end up just reading, you know, one version after another, after another.
00:16:01.460These people that you have never heard of who that day do things that would, you know, in any other circumstance stand as one of the most heroic things a human being could ever do.
00:16:17.180And yet that day is not even the most interesting story on that stretch of 1,135 yards of beach.
00:16:27.220So you break the book up into several sections.
00:16:31.560First section is about the preparation for D-Day.
00:16:34.800And this began an entire year before it actually happened in 1943.
00:16:39.080And I really enjoyed this section because as I was reading that I was incredibly impressed with how thorough everyone was who was preparing this thing, how well thought out it was, the logistics of, you know, figuring out how to move so many people, how to make sure you have enough ships, how to coordinate everything.
00:16:59.220I was thinking, I don't know if we could ever do something like that again, because everything, you know, you even go to a fast food restaurant and things just don't work, but they're somehow able to plan this great undertaking.
00:17:11.100Who were the main planners that you highlight in this section?
00:17:15.700Yeah, this actually to me was one of the more surprising efforts of writing and researching this book was I started this book expecting, you know, I'll have a couple of chapters about the lead up and the planning.
00:17:32.500Yet so much of the story of D-Day actually turns out to be the work that went into preparing for D-Day.
00:17:39.960And in many ways, as terrible and high the cost was in human lives on D-Day itself, it was far lower than planners had anticipated or feared.
00:17:53.740In part due to how good and thorough and specific and advanced the planning was in those months and years ahead of time.
00:18:03.220And so about the first third of the book really ends up being both the planning and the training for D-Day itself.
00:18:12.000And there's this wonderful figure, Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, British general, who ends up the head of the operation to plan for D-Day.
00:18:23.920It's this organization that ends up being called Cossack, the chief of staff to the supreme allied commander, an organization that actually exists for almost a year before they get around to naming a supreme allied commander himself, which of course is Dwight Eisenhower.
00:18:42.360And that Morgan is out there for months planning with this incredibly small staff that with time then grows into this giant machine building in invasion force and invasion plan more complex and larger than anything humans have ever attempted before.
00:19:08.780Is there a part of the planning phase that is sort of archetypical of just how complex preparing for the operation was?
00:19:17.120Well, what I think is sort of funny about it is like you realize sort of how much of the planning ends up taking place in these video game terms you would call side quests.
00:19:27.800The sheer scale of projects that make up the individual components of D-Day.
00:19:38.040One of the challenges that the allied planners are wrestling with is how to bring ashore after the invasion all of the supplies and follow on reinforcements that they're going to need to bring.
00:19:51.300One of the most basic parts of an invasion is, you know, you need to have ports and harbors to bring the follow on supplies by, but where the allies choose to invade doesn't have any natural harbors and ports.
00:20:08.100And so they end up building these things called mulberries, which are basically portable concrete harbors that they're going to float across the channel with tugboats and tow and then sink off the Normandy coast to basically bring their own harbor with them.
00:20:31.580Again, this is just, you know, the equivalent of like one of the many side quests that people are working on leading up to D-Day.
00:20:38.580And those mulberries end up being 2 million tons of steel and concrete, more than 200 caissons constructed by tens of thousands of workers across the British Isles.
00:20:54.580It's some of them as big as five story buildings.
00:20:57.960And then they also bring 70 old Navy ships that they are going to sink off the coast of these harbors to build artificial breakwaters.
00:21:10.520And this one operation alone is so big that it requires every tugboat in the British Isles and as well as a whole bunch brought over from the United States itself, just for this one tiny piece of this giant operation.
00:22:21.340You talk about, there's a quote from someone saying how he took a very personal interest in codenames.
00:22:26.780Yes, he evidently like loves codenames and ends up, you know, talking about them at great length and choosing them and changing them to sort of reflect his own beliefs in these operations.
00:22:39.560But one of my sort of favorite scenes or anecdotes in the book is right up at the end of the run-up to the invasion as they're getting ready.
00:22:50.040He asks, Winston Churchill asks for permission to accompany the landing aboard one of the British Navy vessels.
00:22:59.800And Eisenhower basically says, you know, Winston, I don't think that's a very good idea.
00:23:03.640Then Churchill is like, well, if I just didn't list as a Navy aide aboard one of the ships, like you can't do anything about it.
00:23:13.320And so he makes this plan to accompany the landing as just sort of a run-of-the-mill Navy aide aboard one of the British warships.
00:23:22.220And, you know, Eisenhower is pulling his hair out over this because he doesn't want to risk the prime minister in first wave of the D-Day landing.
00:23:31.780And then the King of England actually gets wind of this, recognizes that it's a problem, and comes up with sort of the only solution that he can think of to get Winston to back down, which is he's like, well, if Winston Churchill's going, I'll go too.
00:23:49.740And, you know, tries to insist, not entirely seriously, it seems, that he will accompany the landing invasion force as well.
00:23:59.460At which point Churchill is like, well, we can't risk the King, so I won't go so the King won't go.
00:24:06.480And, you know, Eisenhower sort of ends up getting a good laugh over the whole thing and how astutely the King maneuvered Winston Churchill out of the invasion force.
00:24:16.460We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:24:26.440And what's crazy, too, about the planning part and getting ready for D-Day, they kept this thing secret.
00:24:32.500The Germans had an idea that something was happening, but they didn't know exactly what was going to happen or when it was going to happen.
00:24:40.420And the other thing I learned, too, from your book, and I didn't realize this, is how much training went on for D-Day.
00:24:48.200Because you don't really, when you watch the movies about World War II, you'll see the crew, like, you know, a company at their boot camp in the United States.
00:24:57.180But you don't see them training for the operations that they took part in.
00:25:01.880What was the training like in preparation for D-Day?
00:25:04.340Yeah, this, again, was part of what was so fascinating to me, was understanding that actually more Allied troops were killed in the training for D-Day than on D-Day itself.
00:25:17.440That the Allies spend really the better part of a year ahead of D-Day running mock invasions of the British countryside.
00:25:29.900That they actually evacuate an entire seaside British county of civilians in order to set up a training facility that looks like the beaches that the troops will storm in Normandy.
00:25:45.040Yeah, that was really interesting, because you get firsthand accounts of the residents there.
00:25:49.520And, you know, they just basically get this announcement saying, yeah, you got to leave.
00:25:53.160You got to sell your stuff and get out of here.
00:25:59.920And that for months, the U.S. and British and Allied troops load up in landing craft and go out into the English Channel and then turn around and storm back ashore in the British countryside as they train for this.
00:26:15.480And that there's one particular exercise in the spring of 44 that's called Exercise Tiger that was supposed to be the last large scale rehearsal for the troops heading to Utah Beach.
00:26:28.840And, you know, it is it is all of the force that is heading to Utah Beach, you know, arrayed out on ships in the English Channel.
00:26:36.080And the night before the dawn invasion preparation, some German torpedo boats get through the security screen and sink a couple of landing craft and end up killing in that one night upwards of 700 Allied servicemen, mostly Americans.
00:26:57.720And we actually don't know the final number.
00:27:00.860It could be much higher than that, even the Pentagon covers that up for decades.
00:27:05.500It's not until really the 1980s that they admit that this incident happened at all, let alone that those units headed to Utah Beach suffered orders of multiple more casualties in Exercise Tiger than they did actually storming ashore at Utah Beach on June 6th, 1944.
00:27:24.760You have some quotes from some soldiers who were part of that and how they had to keep it quiet.
00:27:30.020A story that stood out for me was from Corporal Eugene Carney.
00:27:34.240He says, we were told to keep our mouth shut and taken to a camp where we were quarantined.
00:27:38.920When we went through the mess line, we weren't even allowed to talk to the cooks.
00:27:42.780If, for example, we wanted two potatoes, we were told to hold up two fingers.
00:27:48.860We could have all we wanted, but could say nothing.
00:27:51.100And then another sad one, this is from Private Veldon Downing.
00:27:56.020He said, they told us to keep our mouth shut and we did.
00:27:58.860After the war, the parents of one of the kids I served with, who'd been lost, drove all the way out here from New York just to ask me what happened.
00:28:07.300Yeah, and it was, you know, it was this incredible secret for years and years and years, secret in that moment, both because of the concerns about what it would do to undermine public confidence in the invasion, but also what it would do to the morale of the servicemen heading to the invasion itself in a couple of weeks.
00:28:30.980And one of the things that is really incredible to realize coming out of Exercise Tiger is the thing that had dogged Eisenhower and Morgan and all of the planners through that entire spring had been there just weren't enough landing craft.
00:28:47.480There just weren't enough landing ships and they'd end up delaying the whole operation from May until June in order to get literally one more month's worth of landing craft production in the United States over to Europe.
00:29:03.800And then in Exercise Tiger, they lose a couple more landing craft and that is the last reserve that the entire allied military has of landing craft.
00:29:19.740And they are down to the point where had they lost one or two more landing craft, it's possible that they would have ended up having to scale back the D-Day invasion.
00:29:30.340And not only were soldiers getting very specific training, you talk about how the bombers were also getting trained.
00:29:37.660There was a ton of reconnaissance done in preparation for D-Day and they had film.
00:29:42.520And so these bomber crews, they were watching this film over and over again of what their flight into Normandy would look like.
00:29:48.560And they knew exactly where the pillboxes were, where they needed to drop their bombs.
00:29:52.920So they knew exactly where they needed to go.
00:29:54.740And I mean, that's something that also impressed me was the level of reconnaissance that happened during this planning process.
00:30:01.200Yeah, down to the point where they had such thorough reconnaissance that, you know, if you were the coxswain of a landing craft, you got a photo of what your tiny stretch of beach should look like.
00:30:17.060You know, 1,000 yards off the beach when you are coming into shore.
00:30:22.520You know, it was like incredibly detailed and advanced reconnaissance given the comparatively primitive photographic capabilities and technologies of that era.
00:30:34.100So, okay, at this point, we're a couple months away.
00:30:39.440They still hadn't decided the exact date.
00:30:41.960They knew it was going to be late May, June, based on, you know, where the moon was going to be, tides, things like that.
00:30:48.480But they couldn't pinpoint the exact date because they need to look at the weather.
00:30:52.400And we'll talk about the weather here in a bit.
00:30:54.060So you had, I think it was like 2 million people in England training, just getting ready for this invasion, not knowing when it was going to happen.
00:31:03.720This always becomes an issue in the military when you have a bunch of guys not doing anything, kind of milling about.
00:31:10.380And so you talk about, you know, what Montgomery did, what Eisenhower did to boost morale.
00:31:15.340But you also recount this really harrowing story that just made me, like, I felt sad after I read it, of this chaplain who basically went to go give a pump-up speech to the guys.
00:31:26.800And it was basically the biggest downer.
00:31:28.120He was just like, yeah, it's going to be tough.
00:31:57.940Yeah, it was one of the British units, one of the commando units, sort of got this terrible, as you said, Debbie Downer speech from this padre.
00:32:06.000And Lord Lovat, who's the very colorful commander of the British commandos, ends up basically, like, pushing the guy off stage and jumping up to, you know, recharge up his men, worried that they're going to have this crisis of confidence in themselves in those final hours.
00:32:22.860And he ends up basically saying to the padre, you know, hey, you're off the invasion.
00:32:30.280You know, you can't come with us anymore.
00:32:32.180And the chaplain goes back to his tent and kills himself.
00:32:36.720And he's so despondent about the damage that he's caused to, the potential damage that he's caused to the invasion, they end up listing him formally as a battle casualty, you know, even though he dies in camp before they leave.
00:32:51.100Okay, so you have a section about the weather forecast.
00:33:02.620And then Eisenhower, you just talk about the tension and the stress that Eisenhower had to go through to make this decision because it was on him.
00:33:09.200Like, he was the only one who could make this decision.
00:33:12.320And you can tell that the burden was just so intense on him.
00:33:49.180The weather forecast turns this whole thing and almost upends the entire invasion.
00:33:55.980There are only three days in the start of June when the tides, the moon, all of the weather conditions that they need overlap.
00:34:04.980And if they don't go then, they will need to delay at least two weeks, if not a month.
00:34:11.860The challenge is, when you have an operation as big as D-Day, everyone is on board the ships.
00:34:19.340And entire convoys have already put to sea even before they're sure when exactly the D-Day invasion will be launched.
00:34:28.600And so, Eisenhower is sitting there on June 3rd, June 4th, looking at these weather reports, knowing that D-Day is already in motion.
00:34:39.500There are a million people loading aboard the ships even that weekend.
00:34:44.260And if they can't go on June 6th, they're actually going to need to offload all of those million people and, you know, put them back into camps across England.
00:34:59.140And the security risk of that, these million people all now know their mission.
00:35:03.920They know where the invasion is going to take place.
00:35:06.160And so, for Eisenhower, it's this incredibly high-stakes, almost existential question about the Allied cause and whether the invasion can take place as he's weighing the weather reports.
00:35:20.480And then the weather just clears just a tiny, tiny bit enough to let them launch the invasion.
00:35:27.860And it begins, as you said, that night with the paratroopers, the American paratroopers who are dropped behind the far western flank of Utah Beach, the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, 13,000 of those paratroopers dropping into the western flank and the approaches behind Utah Beach to make sure that the troops can actually get off Utah Beach once they get there.
00:35:55.800And then the British 6th Airborne is dropped along the eastern flank behind what we now call Sword Beach to secure the beach exits there and to seize the river crossings that would stop the German reinforcements from racing up behind the British and Canadian beaches.
00:36:17.820Again, these extraordinary stories that on any other day would be some of the wildest versions of military heroism recorded.
00:36:30.700In the 6th Airborne, they drop three gliders of troops into this tiny field next to this one key bridge that's later now sort of known to history as Pegasus Bridge.
00:36:49.700I've stood there and you look at where these three gliders have all crashed just a couple of yards apart, you know, and it's impossible to imagine doing this in the dark, landing as close to the bridge as they did.
00:37:01.520And they storm out and seize Pegasus Bridge before the Germans have a chance to counterattack or destroy the bridge.
00:37:10.280And then basically sort of set up to wait there till midday or early afternoon on the 6th when reinforcements will finally reach them from Sword Beach.
00:37:20.960So you have a section about the naval part of this.
00:37:30.780And you have some great quotes from the Germans who were, you know, on the shores of Normandy and looking out into the ocean and just seeing just that giant armada.
00:37:41.880You have this one quote from a guy named Carl Wegener.
00:37:55.900I looked out and saw ships as far as one could see.
00:37:59.000I'm not ashamed to say that I was never so scared of my life, but the sight was so impressive that no one could help but stare in amazement.
00:38:06.460I mean, it was just like, I mean, I couldn't imagine.
00:38:08.120Again, like we look in the past, like we know what happened.
00:38:10.080Can you imagine if you're some young 19-year-old German kid and you look out into the sea and it's just thousands and thousands of these black dots that you know they're going to start pounding you with artillery?
00:38:22.200Yeah, and it's also, I think from the German perspective, you get a sense of the confusion and chaos that reigns that day.
00:38:33.460Again, I think it's normally lost in the way that we tell a narrative history, but that comes through so clearly in an oral history.
00:38:41.400Where, you know, even something as simple as like we know and we talk about it as history is these five beaches, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juneau, and Sword.
00:38:51.660I talk about the British Airborne dropping in to secure the eastern flank and the 82nd and 101st Airborne dropping in to secure the western flank.
00:38:59.460The Germans are waking up that morning.
00:39:04.040They don't understand that there are five beaches.
00:39:06.040They don't understand that it's British troops on, you know, one side and American paratroopers on the other.
00:39:13.300They're trying to figure out even whether this is the real invasion because the Allies have done this incredible job basically misdirecting that the real invasion, quote unquote, is going to come in mid-July in Calais, which is the place where the Germans sort of most expect the invasion.
00:39:34.620It's the shortest part across the English Channel.
00:39:37.720It seems like it would be the easiest place to launch an invasion.
00:39:42.360And instead, they launch this invasion across the English Channel, you know, where it's 100 miles wide.
00:39:49.080It is just this utter and complete shock to the Germans who spend the entire day trying to understand what they're actually working on.
00:39:59.260The most harrowing part of D-Day and the one that's been captured in film by, you know, Saving Private Ryan was soldiers leaving landing craft in the ocean and charging the beaches of Normandy.
00:40:10.240Were there any firsthand accounts that stood out to you that really captured the carnage and chaos of that amphibious invasion?
00:40:16.220Yeah, I mean, we talked a little bit about the unit known as the Bedford Boys, you know, that 116th Infantry, Company A, Company B, storming ashore at Omaha Beach.
00:40:26.380But I think one of the things that I really tried to reframe a little bit in this telling of the book is I think we have this mythology in D-Day that Omaha Beach was this incredible killing ground and everything else was a cakewalk, especially the British and Canadian beaches.
00:40:46.800That is sort of technically true in a limited sense if you are talking about people who die on the sand itself.
00:40:58.660But it's not really reflective of the totality of the experience of D-Day, which is when you add in the casualties of the paratroopers and the fighting of the paratroopers behind Utah Beach, that sector is secured at great cost.
00:41:19.340You know, when you talk about the British and Canadian beaches, there are individual units where they are absolutely devastated in their early waves of the invasion.
00:41:32.960A hundred and ten of the Queen's own rifles fall as they march up the beaches in the British sector.
00:41:41.340And then the British and Canadian units get off the beach relatively quickly and then are engaged in very heavy fighting in sort of an urban environment inland on D-Day itself.
00:41:54.740And that for the British and that for the British and Canadian forces, in some ways, the afternoon of D-Day is where they see their most violent combat, even as sort of the Americans, once they get through their beach defenses at Utah and Omaha, sort of their fighting is mostly done.
00:43:21.020I'm not surprised, I guess, that that quote stood out to you.
00:43:24.260But that really stuck with me when I was reading that.
00:43:27.520I'm grateful there was a Canadian journalist named Ted Barris who went out and did the one definitive book on Juno and gathered up a lot of those memories and interviewed a lot of those veterans when they were still around.
00:43:39.820And Ted very nicely shared his research and interviewed transcripts with me for this book.
00:43:44.820And I thought about that moment so much.
00:43:48.340Like, what must it have been like to go through the rest of your life knowing that you had done this thing that you sort of thought was great?
00:43:56.760Like, you had gotten your brother to serve in the same unit as you did and gotten him into the same landing craft that you did on D-Day and then for him to die.
00:44:08.620I don't know what Fred Barnard ever felt about that.
00:44:13.700But you could just imagine the guilt or the second guessing or the responsibility that you would feel for a moment like that.
00:44:25.440And it also just shows, like, how random stuff was.
00:44:27.540There's so many accounts where, you know, a guy would say, like, I just ducked and the bullet whizzed by and hit the guy behind me.
00:44:35.540And these guys, you could tell they just felt so helpless in a lot of cases.
00:44:40.680Of course, there were moments of gallantry and bravery, you know, the Dick Winters types who went up and charged and did all that amazing stuff.
00:44:47.660But I just couldn't imagine what it would have been like.
00:44:49.900One minute you're talking to your buddy and the next minute his head's blown off and you have to keep going.
00:44:56.580You see in so many of the stories that day the randomness of luck and chance.
00:45:03.420And the, as you said, that some of D-Day was skill and some of it was courage and bravery and heroism.
00:45:14.280And a lot of it was just random fate and dumb luck and chance of who was on what patch of sand or, you know, in which hedgerow at which moment when a shell landed or a bullet went by.
00:45:32.160And there were so many people that day who, you know, again, went through these extraordinary moments that were entirely ordinary for everyone around them.
00:45:43.800One of the goals you had with this book was to, I think, address this myth that is, I think, built up around D-Day, that it was this really tenuous thing that was always teetering on the edge of failure.
00:45:56.980But in the narrative that you were able to pull out of these accounts, you see that, yes, there were a lot of casualties.
00:46:03.920A lot of men lost their lives that day.
00:46:06.520But overall, it was really a smashing success.
00:46:10.200It was probably one of the biggest military successes in world history.
00:46:13.040Absolutely, and I think that is, to me, one of the things that really stands out is we have this sense that this was this incredible gamble.
00:46:22.760And at one level it is, but the truth of the matter is every allied amphibious invasion in World War II succeeds.
00:46:32.600And the reason for that is precisely because of what a gamble and amphibious invasion actually is.
00:46:40.720And so for Operation Overlord, the Americans have invested so much.
00:46:47.060They have developed so many new technologies.
00:46:49.480They have developed so many new capabilities.
00:46:52.980They have trained so hard for so long.
00:46:56.920They've brought such scale and scope and size to this invasion that the Germans just don't really have much of a chance on D-Day.
00:47:05.200Anywhere the allies choose to land on D-Day, they are going to punch through.
00:47:12.460The question is, can they stay ashore once they're there?
00:47:17.720And can they get to, you know, can they get enough follow-on supplies and reinforcements ashore faster than the Germans can get reinforcements up from sort of inland in France and Germany?
00:47:33.760And the sort of tenuousness of the invasion actually is not D-Day itself.
00:47:42.020It's the days after June 7th, June 10th, June 14th.
00:47:46.760And that when we talk about D-Day, D-Day is really just the start.
00:47:54.400It takes the Allies 77 days to complete the Normandy campaign and break out of the beachheads that they have built up and, you know, begin the march for Paris and Germany.
00:48:11.300And that D-Day feels like, in so many ways, like the triumph.
00:48:18.060You know, it is the day we storm ashore and pierce fortress Europe.
00:48:21.960But for all of the troops who made it ashore that day and lived, you know, some of their most poignant reflections are waking up the morning of June 7th and starting to fight all over again.
00:48:34.640Yeah, and I think one of the reasons why D-Day, I mean, yes, it was a pivotal moment in, as you say, pivotal moment in human history.
00:48:43.220But it was a moment where there was so much carnage.
00:48:46.640But also you see bravery, you see courage, you see compassion of these soldiers trying to help each other out.
00:48:54.920And I'd like to end with this, this quote from Andy Rooney, if you don't mind.
00:49:01.720Andy Rooney, if you think the world is selfish and rotten, go to the cemetery at Colville-sur-Mare overlooking Omaha Beach and see what one group of men did for another on D-Day, June 6th, 1944.
00:49:22.420Well, Garrett, this has been a great conversation.
00:49:24.440Where can people go to learn more about the book?
00:49:26.500So you can get the book anywhere that you like purchasing books.
00:49:31.860The book is called When the Sea Came Alive.
00:49:34.380If you are a podcast listener, I would encourage you to pick up the audiobook, which is an incredible marvel and masterpiece itself.
00:49:48.420So every voice is different in the audiobook, and you get the full sense of the accents of the British and Canadian and French and Germans who fought that day.
00:50:00.460Well, Garrett Graff, thanks for your time.